this is called ill luck. We will suppose the same event to take
place, when meteorology shall have been perfected into a science,
provided with unerring instruments; but which the farmer had
neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck, but imprudence.
Now apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have
greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him only what
possibly from his own abilities he might have effected for himself,
his good luck will excite less attention and the instances be less
remembered. That clever men should attain their objects seems
natural, and we neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that
success of themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight;
but we dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, when
the same happens to a weak or ignorant man. So, too, though the
latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might
have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than
might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no
hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other
undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs
by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously
false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn
of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of
some one great constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion
and the power of prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having
been as they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out
of his own intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the
illustrious father and founder of philosophic alchemy; if they
presented themselves to Sir Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence
of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic battery; if this
battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident,
and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for